Rock Pi 4: A Rockchip RK3399 powered Raspberry Pi lookalike that starts at US$39

Single board computers (SBCs) are two a penny these days, with the Raspberry Pi still overshadowing its competitors. Most other companies attempt to distinguish their developer boards from their Cambridge-based rival, but not ALLNET. Unashamedly, it has produced an SBC called Rock Pi 4, which comes in two versions, model A and model B.

Both boards measure 85 mm x 54 mm and are powered by a Rockchip RK3399 hexa-core SoC. The chip integrates two ARM Cortex-A72 cores that can clock up to 1.8 GHz and four ARM Cortex-A53 cores that peak at 1.4 GHz. The RK3399 also has an ARM Mali-T860 MP4 GPU, which supports DX11, Vulkan 1.0, Open CL 1.1 and 1.2 along with up to OpenGL ES 3.2. Moreover, both models feature four USB Type-A ports, a HDMI port, a 40-pin GPIO and Gigabit LAN among other ports. The Rock Pi 4 has a USB Type-C port too, which supports USB Power Delivery 2.0 and Qualcomm Quick Charge 3.0.

The main difference between the two models is that the model B has Bluetooth, PoE and Wi-Fi, while the model A does not. Both models come with 1 GB, 2 GB or 4 GB of LPDDR4 dual-channel RAM. ALLNET has released Android, Debian and Ubuntu images, which you can find in the Rock Pi 4's extensive wiki. Third-party Armbian, LibreELEC, and Recalbox images are available too.

The Rock Pi 4 model A starts at US$39 for the 1 GB version, with prices rising to US$74.95 for the 4 GB model B. No models come with built-in storage, but there is a microSD card reader, an M.2 slot and eMMC socket for adding your own drives. The Rock Pi 4 ships worldwide from ALLNET, or suppliers like Innet24 if you are buying from Europe.